Representations Of Homelessness Research Articles

Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

Alluvium Editorial 8.3: Contemporary Representations of Homelessness

Alluvium Editorial 8.3: Contemporary Representations of Homelessness

The new face of homelessness? Examining media representations of women’s homelessness in five Australian news sources

ABSTRACT The news media plays an important role influencing policy development and public discourse on social issues, however there is limited research available which examines media representations of homelessness through the lens of gender. Content analysis and critical discourse analysis were used to examine media representations of women’s homelessness in five Australian news sources: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald. Five broad themes relating to women’s homelessness were identified: violence and victimization, access to appropriate housing, economic factors, social and health factors, and homelessness policy. Women with children experiencing domestic and family violence were the most frequently represented demographic in the sample of articles. While the media acknowledged the perspectives of women with lived experiences of homelessness, it was homelessness services, advocates and government officials who were most often framed as homelessness “experts.” Overall, the media was largely sympathetic towards the issue of women’s homelessness and often framed it as a “crisis” requiring government attention. However, the media also privileged certain perspectives and discourse regarding women’s homelessness, reinforcing notions of the deserving and undeserving poor and overlooking the unequal gender and power relations that contribute to women’s homelessness.

Family homelessness in regional and urban contexts: Service provider perspectives

Abstract The idyllic imaginaries of rural life and representations of homelessness as an urban problem has rendered invisible the existence of homelessness outside urban capital cities. This research explored how service providers working in regional and metropolitan South Australia responded to and constructed intersectional disadvantages faced by homeless parents. This paper presents a thematic analysis of eight qualitative in-depth interviews, highlighting locational differences and the conditionality of the ethnocentric homelessness service system. When considering geographical differences, service providers noted that parents who live in regional areas and experience homelessness face further barriers associated with social disadvantages, including the lack of access to affordable housing, employment scarcity and limited services and supports. Overarching findings were that 1) responses to family homelessness are organizationally and geographically contextualized; 2) available choices, intergenerational circumstances and localized opportunities intersect to contribute to family homelessness, and 3) the eligibility criteria of service systems are mismatched with the experiences of some rural families (such as mobile Aboriginal families and women on temporary visas). Drawing on intersectionality, this paper argues that service provider responses to family homelessness are complicated by western cultural assumptions in service systems and intersecting localized, gendered, racialized, aged and classed social inequalities at micro, mezzo and macro levels in society.

New Realities and Representations of Homelessness in Chinese Children’s Literature in an Era of Urbanization

In the social context of China’s rural–urban migration, a varied set of forces has increasingly challenged the conventional assumptions used to underpin the notion of home as a space fixed in geography and one’s lineage. This essay calls into question the essentialist values associated with home, and explores new realities and representations of homelessness in contemporary Chinese children’s literature. Taking into account critical work on globalization, where the emphasis is on issues of mobility, and reflecting on the Chinese conceptualization of home, this study considers how the traditional territory of home is remapped using literal and allegorical tropes, and argues that representations of floating children, street children and left-behind children in China, as central to the discussion of contemporary Chinese children’s literature in an era of urbanization, mark the transition of the Chinese concept of home from an established locus of security to an open signifier of precariousness and uncertainty.

Representations of homelessness, home environments, and authority in the context of runaway behaviors reported by foster care youth residing in an emergency shelter

ABSTRACTBetween 31 and 46% of youth with histories of foster care placement were homeless at least once. Studies of the incidence of runaway behavior have identified a host of risk factors associated with running away from foster care placement, but less is known about the internalized processes of these individuals at risk for running away or the contextual experience surrounding it. This study is designed to investigate the representations made by individuals who have engaged in running away to uncover and explore thematic patterns. Accordingly, a secondary analysis was performed on data from four group interviews (n = 15) collected from youth under the care of one child protective services (CPS) agency-operated emergency shelter setting, using thematic content analysis by two independent reviewers. Codes were networked and themes that emerged were discussed through a framework of power dynamics. Themes around the participants’ perceptions of homelessness, lack of control, and their resistance to authority were all identified as contributory to the theme of running away. The act of running away is, therefore, framed as a threshold event representing a multifaceted phenomenon combining perceptions of self-identity, conflict, and power in the home.

An Affinity for the Lumpen: Depictions of Homelessness in Delany’s Bread & Wine and The Mad Man

Bread & Wine and The Mad Man ’s depictions of homeless men as desirable, the texts’ analyses of class as central to human desires, and their affirmation of the unsettling effects of interclass contact contradict social realist and romanticizing literary representations of homelessness and form an important intervention into the political and literary discourse on the lumpenproletariat. Both texts show sexual relations between homeless men and academics. From the excitement of first getting to know each other to the everyday process of building a lasting relationship, these men eroticize the class differences usually experienced as unsettling, and go to astonishing lengths in presenting as a blueprint for social change one of the character’s central insight: The more different a person is from me, the more I’ll learn from them.

Representations of Homelessness in Four Canadian Newspapers: Regulation, Control, and Social Order

This article reports on a content analysis of homelessness representations in four Canadian newspapers: two city broadsheets, one city tabloid, and one national newspaper. Clear differences between the papers emerged showing that in general coverage of homelessness in Calgary was much more positive than coverage in Vancouver. It conveyed a stronger sense of crisis or urgency and a stronger sense of optimism that the problem should and can be solved. Experts dominate public discourse about homelessness, with people who experience homelessness themselves marginalized as speakers. Despite these differences, the four papers present a unified narrative of homelessness in which readers are exhorted to be sympathetic to the plight of homeless people while at the same time, ‘they’ are presented as needing to be controlled and regulated in order to maintain social order. This narrative has implications for citizenship and social inclusion of people who experience homelessness.